Browsing by Author "Felt, Kristiina"

In spite of the current wide-spread use of the idea of our personal liberties, not enough attention is given to the actual justification of this concept itself: from what philosophical grounds our liberties can be argued from and how the value of our personal liberties stands itself as a philosophical concept. One of the most important philosophers defending our personal liberties is widely perceived to be John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), an English philosopher who developed his thinking on liberty in the 19th century. However, the plausibility Mill’s hedonistic ethics has been widely criticized in philosophical literature. This research examines John Stuart Mill’s hedonistic ethics and his hedonistic defence for our personal liberties. The thesis asks, can Mill’s defence of our liberty that relies purely on the foundation of hedonism be plausible? The first chapter introduces the research question and the structure of the research. The second chapter first presents Mill’s core ethical ideas and then introduces how a perfectionist reading can challenge the hedonism of Mill’s ethics. The third chapter discusses G.E. Moore’s critique against hedonism. Chapter 4 defends Mill’s justification for his hedonistic foundation for morality with Geoffrey Sayre-McCord’s thinking. Chapters 5 and 6 examine Sarah Conly’s theory and her critique against Mill’s simple principle for liberty and argue the critique is not plausible if we read Mill as a hedonist. The concluding chapter draws together the results of the study. The thesis focuses on the problems of the arguments against Mill’s hedonistic ethics showing how these arguments fail to convince that the hedonistic reading of Mill’s ethics is not plausible. As a conclusion, the research provides arguments for why it is plausible to continue to interpret and examine Mill as a hedonist and argue for a hedonistic defence of our personal liberties regardless of the several things Mill states that appear to not adhere to the single value of hedonism. The research suggests that despite the challenges presented in this work, there remains a plausible rationale to continue to read Mill as a hedonist and argue for our personal liberties from this foundation. However, the conclusion is conditional. The research also shows that to plausibly argue for our personal liberties, Mill’s overall concept of happiness that contains the ideas of individuality and social flourishing, needs to be understood through the aspect of constant human progress. Whether such a concept of happiness can be argued to be a merely hedonistic concept, however, falls out of the scope of this research.